The darkness behind Spencer's eyes was wrong.
He'd fallen asleep in the room he shared with Mat and Perrin, Thread Sight running at its lowest level as a reflex — just enough awareness to notice if something approached in the night. The transition from waking to sleeping should have been seamless, a gentle slide into unconsciousness.
Instead, he found himself standing in a hall of flame.
Pillars of fire rose on either side, casting orange light across flagstones that stretched toward an impossible horizon. The architecture was ancient — older than Tar Valon, older than the Breaking — and the air tasted of ash and something worse. Something that made Spencer's throat close and his hands shake.
At the far end of the hall, a figure waited.
[WARNING: ANTI-PATTERN CONSTRUCT DETECTED]
[WARNING: DREAM INVASION IN PROGRESS]
[WARNING: UNKNOWN ENTITY — CLASSIFICATION PENDING]
The Codex screamed alerts, but Spencer barely heard them. His attention was fixed on the figure — on the thread that wasn't a thread. Where everyone else in the world existed as luminous filaments in the Pattern's weave, this thing was a void. An absence. A hole in reality shaped like a man, and the threads around it bent and frayed and dissolved as if fleeing from its presence.
"So," said Ba'alzamon. "The Wheel sends me its little patch-job."
The voice was fire and darkness and something that crawled inside Spencer's skull and made itself at home. The figure stepped forward, and the flames bent away from it, and Spencer saw a face — ancient, beautiful, terrible, with eyes that burned like coals in a furnace.
Ishamael. The Betrayer of Hope. The Dark One's chief lieutenant, and possibly the Dark One himself speaking through a willing vessel.
"I wondered when I would find you." Ba'alzamon's smile was a wound in the fabric of the dream. "The stitch that doesn't belong. The thread that was not woven."
Spencer's mouth was dry. His heart was hammering. The Codex was throwing up barriers — purple light flickering at the edges of his vision — but Ba'alzamon's presence pressed against them with casual, contemptuous ease.
"I don't—" Spencer started.
"Do not lie to me, little anomaly." Ba'alzamon's voice cracked like a whip. "I have watched the Pattern for three thousand years. I know what belongs and what does not. And you..." The void-figure leaned closer, and Spencer felt his Codex Stamina plummeting — 28, 22, 15 — burning away as the barriers fought to hold. "You are a bandage on a wound that I will reopen."
[CODEX STAMINA CRITICAL: 9/30]
[BARRIER INTEGRITY: 34%]
Spencer tried to move, to wake, to do anything, but the dream held him like a fly in amber. Ba'alzamon's presence filled everything, pushed into every corner of his mind, and the Codex's shields were cracking under the pressure.
"The boys are mine," Ba'alzamon said softly. "The Pattern's champions. The Light's last desperate throw. And when I have them, when I have broken them and remade them in my image — I will return for you. The little patch. The thread that thinks itself important."
[CODEX STAMINA CRITICAL: 4/30]
[BARRIER INTEGRITY: 12%]
[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL: FORCED AWAKENING INITIATED]
The dream shattered.
---
Spencer woke gasping, blood running from his nose.
The room was dark, lit only by the faint glow of coals in the hearth. His hands were shaking. His head felt like someone had driven nails through his temples. And underneath it all, the Codex hummed with exhausted warning:
[CODEX STAMINA: 4/30]
[BARRIER PROTOCOL: Successful. Entity contact terminated.]
[WARNING: Thread damage detected. Self-repair initiated. Estimated recovery: 48-72 hours.]
Spencer pressed his palm to his nose and breathed. In. Out. In. Out.
Ba'alzamon saw me. Recognized me. Called me what I am — an anomaly, a patch-job, something the Wheel stuck into its weave to fix a problem.
He's going to come back.
Mat's breathing was ragged in the bed across the room. Perrin was sitting up, his golden eyes gleaming in the darkness, and his thread bore the same scorch-marks Spencer could feel on his own — faint burns where Ba'alzamon's presence had touched too close.
"You too?" Perrin's voice was barely a whisper.
"Yeah." Spencer wiped blood from his upper lip. "The man with the burning eyes."
"He said things. About the Dark One. About serving or dying." Perrin's thread rippled with fear he was trying not to show. "Rand and Mat... they're both awake. They're not talking."
The dream invasion. Right on schedule. Except this time, Ba'alzamon noticed me too.
This isn't in the books. This is new. This is my fault.
---
Breakfast was a quiet affair.
Rand sat in a corner, staring at nothing, his golden thread flickering with disturbed energy. Mat's jokes had dried up; he picked at his food without eating, his own thread showing the same scorch-marks as the others. Perrin ate mechanically, his attention turned inward.
Spencer wrapped both hands around a mug of tea and counted his heartbeats until they slowed below eighty.
Seventy-eight. Seventy-six. Seventy-four.
The Codex showed him his own thread now — white with its strange gold shimmer, but marked with dark spots where Ba'alzamon's presence had burned through the barriers. Purple repair-threads were already working at the damage, tiny stitches mending what had been torn.
Self-repair. The Codex can heal thread damage.
Good to know. Would have been better to know before I needed it.
Moiraine appeared at the table, her silver-blue thread thrumming with controlled urgency. One look at the boys' faces told her everything she needed to know.
"We leave within the hour," she said. No questions, no explanations. Just command. "Pack your things. We ride north."
Spencer met her eyes and saw the calculation there — she knew what had happened in the night, or suspected it strongly. The dream invasion was part of the Pattern's plan, part of the Shadow's opening move against the ta'veren.
But Spencer's presence in that dream wasn't part of any plan. And Moiraine was smart enough to notice the anomaly.
She's going to have questions, Spencer thought. And I'm going to need answers that don't involve "the Dark One's chief lieutenant called me a patch-job."
He finished his tea and went to pack.
The Codex hummed with exhausted warning, and somewhere in the darkness, Ba'alzamon was already planning his next move.
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